Developing a Cross-Platform Mobile Game with React Native and Phaser #GameDev #ReactNative #Phaser

Table of Contents

Day 10: Optimizing and Publishing Your React Native + Phaser Game

You’ve made it to Day 10! 🎉
Today, we’ll prepare your cross-platform mobile game built with React Native and Phaser for production: optimize performance, make it responsive, and finally, package it for publishing on iOS and Android using Expo.

🧠 What You’ll Learn

How to optimize Phaser for mobile performance
How to make your game scale on any screen size
How to bundle assets and game HTML in a WebView
How to build and publish your game using Expo EAS

📏 Step 1: Make Phaser Canvas Responsive

Update your Phaser config to use full width/height dynamically:

const config = {
  type: Phaser.AUTO,
  scale: {
    mode: Phaser.Scale.FIT,
    autoCenter: Phaser.Scale.CENTER_BOTH,
    width: window.innerWidth,
    height: window.innerHeight,
  },
  physics: {
    default: 'arcade',
    arcade: { debug: false }
  },
  scene: [MenuScene, GameScene, PauseScene, GameOverScene]
};

This makes your game canvas responsive across all device sizes.

🗃️ Step 2: Inline and Minify Your Game HTML (Optional)

You can:

Combine assets/scripts into a single game.html
Minify using https://html-minifier.com
Cache resources via CDN (e.g. Phaser, images, audio)

Place your game.html in assets/phaser/game.html (or bundle it remotely via HTTPS for Android ease of use).

🌐 Step 3: Use WebView Correctly in React Native

In your App.js:

import React from 'react';
import { WebView } from 'react-native-webview';
import { Platform } from 'react-native';

export default function App() {
  const source = Platform.select({
    ios: require('./assets/phaser/game.html'),
    android: { uri: 'https://yourcdn.com/game.html' }, // Or use local asset workaround
  });

  return (
    <WebView
      originWhitelist={['*']}
      source={source}
      javaScriptEnabled
      domStorageEnabled
      allowsFullscreenVideo
      style={{ flex: 1 }}
    />
  );
}

⚠️ For Android local file access, you’ll need to manually copy files into the android/app/src/main/assets/ folder. Alternatively, serve it via HTTPS.

📦 Step 4: Build for Android and iOS with Expo

Use Expo EAS Build for production builds.

1. Install EAS CLI:

npm install -g eas-cli

2. Configure your project:

eas build:configure

3. Build the app:

eas build --platform android
# or
eas build --platform ios

Follow prompts to create .apk or .ipa files.

📱 Step 5: Test & Submit

Test on real devices via Expo Go and downloaded APKs
Create developer accounts on Google Play Console and App Store Connect
Submit your game to the stores for review

✅ What You’ve Achieved

Built a fully playable, mobile-optimized Phaser game
Packaged it inside a React Native app using WebView
Added polish: music, animations, pause/resume, levels, leaderboard
Learned to publish for Android and iOS using Expo + EAS

🏁 Series Complete

You now have a production-ready, cross-platform mobile game built entirely with React Native and Phaser — ready to entertain users on both Android and iOS!

Looking for more?

👉 Build in-app purchases, multiplayer, or convert your WebView game into a standalone HTML5 browser game.

Happy game dev! 🎮🚀

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